“You’re farming in Alaska?! What can you possibly grow there?” This was a common response when I told people I was moving to Alaska to be an AmeriCorps VISTA at Calypso Farm and Ecology Center in Ester, Alaska. To be honest, I myself wasn’t quite sure what to expect. When I arrived in April, the ground was still covered in ice, the fields covered in snow. Three months later, I’ve discovered the shocking truth. In Alaska, a food revolution is brewing, and it’s led by 12 year olds.

Calypso Farm and Ecology Center (Calypso), founded in 2000, is a successful educational, working farm located near Fairbanks, Alaska. Calypso’s mission is to promote local agriculture and environmental awareness through hands-on education in natural and farming ecosystems. They provide educational programs for children and adults, reaching thousands of individuals annually. Programs include: farm field trips, farm and garden workshops, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farm apprenticeships and an extensive school garden network–the Schoolyard Garden Initiative (SGI). Through all of its programming, Calypso works to provide food and education access for low-income members of the community.

The SGI is an innovative community food program which creates organic school gardens that function as youth-operated food gardens during the summer months and experiential learning environments during the school year. This program responds to the need for locally grown food for the community, a gardening, nutrition and employment connection for youth and hands-on educational opportunities in the schools.

Fairbanks, Alaska is a community driven by the seasons. There can be snow on the ground from September through April. This climate makes food accessibility paramount. If you drive past the grocery store on a wintery evening it isn’t uncommon to see several taxis lined up in front, taking people without cars to get their groceries. If it seems difficult to get food within the state, it is even more difficult to get food to the state. Food often travels thousands of miles from the lower 48 to make it into the grocery aisles. It is said that if Alaska were to be cut off from the lower 48, Alaska’s supermarket food supply would be gone in three days.

The students in the SGI program have taken matters into their own hands. There are currently six schools in the program. These Student Gardeners (aged 12-18) plant, maintain, harvest and sell vegetables throughout the summer. They will also assist in teaching home gardening workshops to aspiring gardeners in the community and garden lessons to younger children in the fall. In exchange for their work, each Student Gardener takes home a weekly supply of vegetable and receives a monetary stipend at the end of the season. For most, this is their first job experience.

School Garden produce is available to the public through CSA’s and at weekly Farm Stands. Each garden offers a small number of CSA shares and operated a weekly Farm Stand on site. All produce is available for purchase with Food Stamps, WIC and Senior Coupons. Five of the six schools are within walking distance of low-income housing and two of the schools are federally recognized as Title I Schools (serving low-income students).

The Student Gardeners aren’t just farmers in training. They are agents of positive change, cultivating a new food culture. With pitchforks in hand, they shout “I love kohlrabi!” from the rooftops. They prefer vermiculture to video games. They don’t just finish their vegetables, they grow them. This is farming in Alaska.

I accepted an invitation from Derrick Kiyabu recently to visit MA’O Organic Farm where the path out of poverty starts with a walk down the farm’s vegetable rows. On the west side of the island of Oahu, just past Honolulu’s ocean view condos and the Pearl Harbor Naval Base I found myself on Highway 93 where a sign saying “Now Leaving Paradise, Welcome to Poverty” would be placed if tourist officials chose to acknowledge such things. But lacking what many vacationers are looking for in a tropical getaway, the Wai’anae Coast, as it is commonly known, can only offer fast-food joints, scruffy commercial buildings, and residential housing that rivals the worst of third-world Asia. Perhaps this is why the Lonely Planet guidebook refers to the region, almost quaintly, as “a little bit of Appalachia by the sea.”

My pre-farm tour reached a crescendo when I saw a homeless encampment cobbled together along a one-mile stretch of state beach. Late model cars – many rusted and in states of disassembly – jerry-rigged shelters, and a mish mash of makeshift camping and cooking gear presented such a scene of utter destitution that even knuckle-dragging conservatives would advocate for immediate relief.
As I moved inland a couple of miles, the landscape and my impressions changed. Small sections of dry, flat farmland intermingle with vast tracks of military land – securely fenced and sporting giant arrays of submarine-tracking sonar towers. It is here though, amid palm and banana trees, that you’ll find the peaceful acres of MA’O Organic Farms, armed with nothing more dangerous than wholesome organic produce and 40 or so farm interns between the ages of 17 and 24.

Like almost all the interns and staff, Derrick is wearing the farm’s “No Panic, Go Organic” t-shirt. Noting some of the underlying principles of the program, he reminds me that “pre-contact” Hawaiians were 100% food self-reliant and that their traditional farming methods were totally organic. In a more pragmatic vein, he also explains the program’s business model: “Organic produce generates the most revenue from our customers such as Whole Foods, natural food stores, CSA members, and Honolulu’s high-end restaurants.” As a self-described social enterprise, the non-profit farm generates 40 percent of its million-dollar-plus annual budget from produce sales. This is how they support the youth development and leadership program that is at the core of farm’s mission. Promoting food security in the surrounding region is secondary to the need to generate funds for instructional needs, community college tuition, and stipends for the workers.

Without a doubt, the produce is top-notch. The packing sheds – two retrofitted chicken coops – are filled with interns washing and packing perfect heads of green and white bok choy, glowing red radishes, and gorgeous greens. A big whiteboard lists all the customers and the number of units each will purchase that day. As the young people pack each order in custom boxes and load them on to the refrigerated delivery truck, pride is evident in their smiles; after all, they grew it, picked it, and packed it. From the sales revenue, they’ll be paid a monthly stipend by it. It will also help send them to college.

But MA’O isn’t just another scheme to reconnect kids to land, food, and a little income. According to Kamu Enos, MA’O’s Social Entrepreneur Director, the farm is a training and leadership development program designed to overcome the poverty and social dysfunction that was so evident on my drive in. He tells me that “this region of Oahu has the highest concentration of native Hawaiians on all the Islands. We also have a 20% poverty rate, which is disproportionately higher for Hawaiians. Over 40% of our kids drop out of school and only 10% of our graduating high school class goes to college, and many of those leave during the first year.” Derrick puts the problem more succinctly, “Our public education system has ripped off our kids.”

When I noted the unusually high number of very heavy people I saw in Wai’anae, Kamu explained that, like other Native American communities, the ravages of Spam, loss of land, and the decline of traditional practices have taken their toll on peoples’ bodies as well as their souls. “The root problem,” said Kamu, “is the disconnect between our land, people, and economy. Instead [of controlling these things], we exist under the predatory practices of the military.” Not only does the Defense Department control most of the land in the region, military recruiters find local Hawaiians easy targets for enlistment because good civilian job opportunities are so few.
Getting control of land, especially for farming, is a daunting challenge for Hawaiians – there’s not much affordable, arable land that developers don’t already have their mitts on. But sugar daddies do show up, and they are not always the kind that operated sugar cane plantations. In MA’O Organic Farms’ case, the sweet guy is none other than Pierre Omidyar, founder of E-Bay. He generously dropped a cool million on the program, which, with assistance from the Trust for Public Land, bought the 11 acres that are now the heart of the farm.

Pua, 21, is a MA’O youth leader and the first member of her family to go to college. She recently received her associate degree from Leeward Community College and is scheduled to start at the University of Hawaii at Manoa this August. She tells me that high school didn’t prepare her for college, but with her mother’s encouragement and MA’O’s help – counseling, remedial instruction, and peer support – she’s overcome some personal hurdles and is now ready for bigger challenges. While she’s not likely to pursue farming as a career she credits the program with giving her the emotional tools she needed to succeed. “The farm experience is an inspiration. Like college, it’s hard work. The farm grounds you because you have to manage your time, you have to work as a team with others to succeed, and you have to face the consequences of your actions.”

Sending worthy young people to college is admirable, but almost more importantly the program cultivates the interns’ state of mind. Other young people like Pua, start to eat better and lose weight. One youth worker, Kainoa, lost 130 pounds by exercising and changing his diet. Disempowered, brought up with low expectations, some homeless, these interns stared at a future that promised little but a swift descent into diabetes and a life in the unemployment line. Now the steps out of poverty are more visible.

To grow and sell a half-million dollars of organic fruits and vegetables every year is no small feat. But to raise dozens of young leaders who can challenge the dominance of the condo kings and restore the economic and physical health of their people would no doubt bring a smile to the ancient kings and queens of Hawaii.

Seattle is where Asian America intersects with food and environmental justice, as I discovered when I spoke there recently as part of a “Sustainable Growth Summit” convened by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Seattle embodies the diversity, contradictions and great talent that define our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: wealth and poverty, hunger and abundance, access or exclusion based on citizenship and English language proficiency.

Thus it made sense that the event was held at North Seattle Community College, which recently received Federal designation as an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution. Many don’t know that the largest sector of AAPI college enrollment (47 percent) is at community colleges; NSCC President Mark Mitsui began the day describing their college’s new sustainability efforts (including cafeteria composting) and reminding visitors to count community colleges as key partners in building the so-called “green economy.”

I led a panel on “Local Foods for Economic Development,” and it attracted a diverse and opinionated mix of students, farmers, activists and one food-justice bookseller. WHIAAPI Commissioner Kamuela Enos is the director of education programs at Ma’o Organic Farms in Oahu, Hawaii and a rising star of the AAPI sustainable agriculture movement. The program he works with trains community college students in organic farming and wholesale and retail sales, with an emphasis on traditional crops and indigenous farming techniques. Wearing cheery shirts with the company motto “No Panic, Go Organic!” students learn how to sell high-quality produce through various channels including a local CSA, farmers markets, and to chefs across the Islands. Ma’o is accomplishing all this in an area in Oahu with levels of poverty near 20 percent, with some census tracts exceeding 50 percent.

A more sobering perspective was offered by Washington State Extension Officer Bee Cha, who coordinates their Hmong Outreach Program. While the farmers he works with are experts at fruit, vegetable and flower cultivation, language and cultural barriers have made it difficult for them to achieve financial stability. Hmong farmers enliven Pike Place Market with a stunning cornucopia of flowers, but Bee described their difficulties breaking into the higher-margin wedding and corporate flower market.

Finally, USDA Washington State Business & Cooperative Programs Director Tuana Jones shared some of the tools her office can offer to AAPI farmers and entrepreneurs: assistance setting up a cooperative, grant programs for cold storage and marketing assistance, connections to farmers markets, and more. I used to work with Rural Development (which administers the Business and Cooperative Programs) in Washington, DC and have great respect for their work. Under the Obama administration they’ve made local and regional foods a new priority, and Tuana spoke expertly on their work in that arena.

There is a rich history of AAPIs in farming, fishing, canning and food retail in Seattle, and the day after the Summit I toured the historic Chinatown/International District. We visited Danny Woo Community Garden, a glorious patch of green in the middle of the city managed by Interim CDA, a community development and low-income housing provider. The garden is tended by elderly gardeners and their young apprentices, who celebrate the harvest every year with a free Filipino-style “Pig Roast” in the garden. Seattle is a backyard chicken mecca (city government named 2010 the Year of Urban Agriculture), and the Danny Woo Garden recently expanded their chicken coops and added an affordable “Urban Farm Camp” for local children to learn about chickens, food and agriculture.

Some of the greatest ideas in food justice and sustainability are being born in Seattle’s AAPI communities. I hope the rest of the country takes note, and Seattleites, please let me know what I missed in the comments below.

UPDATE: After this piece was published, I received additional statistics from Bee Cha of Washington State Extension: Roughly 80% of Hmong farmers in the area grow flowers, and out of about 90 Hmong farms in Washington, only 4 farmers own their land. Access to markets is especially important for these hardworking flower growers.

Here’s a link to the immigrant farmers program he works with:

Thursday, August 4 is the final day for public comment on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plan to limit mercury emissions from coal and oil-fired power plants. Two decades overdue, the proposed regulation would capture 91 percent of airborne mercury before it leaves the smokestack.

Despite widely available and proven technology, power-plant mercury currently floats unregulated beyond the reach of the Clean Air Act. While the utilities industry has delayed regulation through lobbying and court challenges, I have watched upwind construction of more than 20 new coal-fired generators over the past 20 years.

Containing the toxin is important to clean air and a responsible energy policy, of course. But for my neighbors and me it’s primarily an issue of food.

I live in the village of Saranac Lake, on a street named Lake, within a mile of Lower Saranac Lake, from which I’m not supposed to eat a single fish. My town is inside New York State’s Adirondack Park—not a park in the traditional sense, but a Vermont-size region of communities, protected forests and more than 11,000 lakes and ponds, from which the Department of Health advises I eat no pike, walleye or bass.

Like people elsewhere, Adirondackers are trying to grow more of our own fruits and vegetables, a short-season scramble on this northern granite outcrop. Unlike people elsewhere, a lot of us still hunt to fill the larder.

So it’s frustrating that there’s a barrier between us and the one local food that’s actually abundant—fish. The state annually stocks fingerlings here by the millions, and millions more hatch on their own. But as prevailing winds carry mercury from Midwestern power plants toward the Atlantic, it falls on the Adirondacks in rain and snow, poisoning the fish.

The matter-of-fact language in the booklet issued with my fishing license—“Fish can be good to eat and nutritious, but some fish contain chemicals that may be harmful to health”—is as forceful as a cigarette-pack warning circa 1966. Mercury concentrates as it moves up the food chain from zooplankton, to fish, to osprey or human. It can cause brain damage in fetuses and children, so women and kids must be especially careful.

The heavy metal is more toxic in the Adirondacks than in much of the Northeast because our bedrock lacks calcium to buffer another lingering export of coal-fired electricity: acid rain. Mercury reacts in wetlands and low pH to produce methylmercury, an organic form that living things absorb readily.

As I read about New England towns going back to the water with community-supported seafood cooperatives, the catch-and-don’t-eat policy of the Adirondacks grows increasingly intolerable. Angling here is promoted as sport, but I fish for food. Seventeen percent my county’s residents live below the poverty level; for some of them, fish for dinner is not just a choice.

I grew up in 1970s–80s Buffalo, New York, eating PCB-contaminated walleye from Lake Erie, a Rust Belt water ringed by factories and farms. After 38 years of the Clean Water Act, the Department of Health advises I may now consume more fish from Erie than from Lower Saranac, a loon-song lake fringed by cedars and ferns. Mercury persists longer in the ecosystem than polychlorinated biphenyls, but if Lake Erie can recover then there’s hope for other Northeastern waters.

Coal produces greenhouse gases and toxic fly ash, and obliterates Appalachian mountaintops. Mercury is one thing wrong with coal that’s relatively easy to fix, yet Ohio-based American Electric Power Co., Inc. (AEP) and coal-state legislators continue to stall. AEP even drafted legislation to delay new mercury standards and shopped it around Congress. EPA is scheduled to adopt a final rule by November, if it’s not derailed.

I may never get to eat a fish from my home lake. But for the sake of Saranac and the kids who love to catch fish there, we can’t let mercury slip by any longer.

Act now to help the cause. You can submit comments to the EPA via e-mail to a-and-r-docket@epa.gov or by visiting the comment site on-line. Be sure to include docket number EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0234.

Dan and Isabelle sit patiently on the folding metal chairs in the tastefully decorated waiting room of Seattle’s Ballard Food Bank. Intelligent, soft-spoken, and in his late 50s, Dan is a chronically underemployed architectural draftsman who barely managed to eke out three days of temporary work over the past week. His unemployment benefits have long since evaporated and he’s thinking about applying for food stamps, although he cringes as the words leave his mouth. With his shrunken income dedicated to keeping a roof over his head, he and Isabelle are two among 1,200 or so neighborhood residents who will request a shopping cart-full of food this week at the food bank.

Peggy Bailey, Ballard’s Operation Manager, is one of those dedicated, unflappable souls whose work holds the lives of others together as the larger universe spins out of control. Her recitation of statistics is the “growth” story that you’ll hear from any of the 60,000 emergency food sites across America: “In 2001 we were serving about 350 people per week; four years ago it was 450; now we’re serving between 1,100 and 1,200.” Peggy escorts me past tattooed skateboarders, young women clutching babies, and unshaven men for whom a good night is a dry patch of grass underneath a bridge.

Like all the 25 volunteers (out of a total of 100) on hand this day—good neighbors who keep the flow of people safe and dignified—Peggy beams with pride over the food, large walk-in refrigerators, and the recently retrofitted 6,200-square-foot machine shop that’s been their new home for only a year (after relocating from their cramped, dilapidated home of nearly 40 years). Almost half of the available food is produce, some of which comes from nearby Pea Patch community gardens and local fruit tree gleaners. An abundant supply of artisan bread, fresh dairy products, and even enough frozen meat to give each person two packages, fill the shelves. Not only can you select from a rather remarkable range of products, e.g., microwaveable entrees that retail for $9.00 at Trader Joe’s, and a “no-cook” section that, in an average month, serves 350 people without kitchens. In addition, nearly 100 bags are assembled and delivered weekly to shut-ins and people with special dietary needs.

Unlike food banks in days of yore, Ballard does more than give away food. If you don’t have a permanent address, they’ll act as your personal post office box, a service currently used by 480 people. Case workers from the Department of Social and Health Services try to connect food bank users with SNAP (food stamps) as well as medical and dental services. Need help paying your rent or electrical bill? You can apply for a $300 voucher for the former and $200 voucher for the latter.

When I asked Peggy how she keeps up with the demand for food, she told me, almost blithely, that enough food was not a problem. In a comment that would make her the envy of every food bank worker in America, she said, “We’ve never had to turn anyone away due to lack of food. This is a very generous community. We have Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, and dozens of other food donors.” While supporting five paid staff, three trucks, and a good-size modern facility, the food bank gets 95 percent of its operating funds from private donations, receiving only $40,000 per year from Seattle city government. One anonymous individual, for instance, gives the Ballard Food Bank $2,000 each month just to buy fresh dairy products.

In contrast to the generosity of the surrounding neighborhoods, you have the U.S. House of Representatives. If the miracles that these Seattle residents pull off every day make Jesus Christ’s feeding of the 5,000 look like a cheap card trick, the House majority’s proposal to slash $3 billion from SNAP, WIC, and TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program) makes Scrooge look like a Salvation Army volunteer. At a time when the nation’s economy is still on life support and when a record 43 million Americans are receiving food stamps (cite), the House Republicans want to hack the safety net with a machete while leaving the silver cutlery of hedge fund operators untarnished. Take from the poor, but don’t touch a dime of the rich.

Ballard is a human-scale urban environment whose sloping landscape gently lowers you to the shores of the Puget Sound. On street corners, food bank volunteers greet the homeless people by name, who, in turn, respond in a friendly manner, pleased that there are people who don’t avert their eyes. Stroll a few blocks north of Market Street, and you’ll come to a lovely park where grassy slopes and park benches are populated by homeless men catching a ray or two of Seattle’s stingy sunlight. In the opposite corner is a small skateboard tunnel where young dudes, hat brims cocked at precise angles, practice their chutes and curls. Between the skaters and the homeless are several fountains that spray giggling toddlers cheered on by happy moms.

The park reflects Ballard’s values: There’s room for everybody, diversity is encouraged, and the community does its darnedest to meet everyone’s needs. But, beneath this cloak of tolerance, there is a creeping sense that there may be limits to what any group of caring people can do. Perhaps it’s symbolized by the police cruiser stationed just across the street from the “homeless end” of the park. Maybe you hear it in the voices of the young men at the food pantry who were too ashamed to give me their names, but did say that in spite of a couple of years of college they couldn’t find jobs: “We’re not trained for anything.” Or perhaps you can smell it on the breath of the middle-aged drunken man, who according to Peggy had been “doing so well up until now.”

If the House Republicans have their way, the Ballard Food Bank’s waiting room could very well become so crowded that the smiling volunteers will be replaced by stern-faced security guards. When I asked John, an 87-year old food bank volunteer of 12 years, what he thought was behind the ever rising number of clients, he said emphatically, “It’s all about the economy. I see how embarrassed people are who are asking for help, but you can either sleep on the street or come to the food bank.” One has to ask if that is the vision that the budget cutting, non-taxing conservative minority have for America. If that is true, and every statement from the Republican leadership seems to suggest that it is, then one has to ask where the rage is at this time in our nation’s history.

How big must food banks get to contain the ever-swelling legions of un- and underemployed workers? How much food will Ballard’s neighborhood grocers have to donate to ensure that all the young mothers can feed themselves as well as their babies? Is there indeed a tipping point when community compassion can no longer clean up the mess made by mean-spirited politicians who avert their eyes from the growing victims of a failed American dream?

Evelyn, 87, has been volunteering at the Ballard Food Bank for 15 years, longer than anyone else. She’s a feisty, retired machinist who worked for a Boeing Aircraft subcontractor. Sitting at a table where she was sorting nuts into small plastic bags for the home delivery sacks, Evelyn shared the most commonly expressed reason for volunteering at food banks. “If you’ve been blessed, you have to give back.” Yes, I said, I’d heard that sentiment from many people in the emergency food world, but I wondered if there wasn’t something else. At that point the fiery machinist union member took over from the charitable grandmother. Growing up during the Great Depression on a Minnesota farm, she did not need the reason for rage explained to her. “Things have to change in this country,” she said, eyes narrowing and pronouncing each syllable more distinctly. “The idea of not taxing the rich is ridiculous. We have to stop farm and oil subsidies. We got to get politicians to care about people all the time, not just when they’re trying to get elected.”

Compassion and “giving back” may not be sustainable when one class of Americans lives under the House Republicans’ Golden Fleece, while bourgeoning flocks live under highway overpasses. So that compassion may live, we must sometimes release the rage.

Deborah Kane is the Vice President of Food and Farms for Ecotrust, a Portland, Oregon-based conservation and economic development group that has their hands in a variety of powerful pots including a USDA-backed online service called FoodHub that helps connect farms of every size with schools, hospitals, caterers, restaurants, and distributors. Deborah is also the publisher of Edible Portland. She was invited to the White House a few weeks ago to brief President Obama on FoodHub, which she hopes will go national next year.

What issues have you been focused on?

I’m very focused on connecting producers to domestic markets. While I’m making sure that farmers are meeting restaurants, grocers, caterers, hospitals, we also have a specific expertise in school food service directors. I’ve been focused on creating market opportunities in general and more specifically on schools.

What inspires you to do this work?

I just get a thrill from the e-mail or the phone call from the farmer that says they have a new customer, account or client because of the work we do. For me, it’s all about farmers, ranchers, and fisherman operating viable business that will be around in the future.

What’s your overall vision?

That good food be available wherever people shop and congregate. That it would be unthinkable to sit down at a meal in any context, whether on an airplane, your aunt’s house or in a school cafeteria and not know where the food came from. Unthinkable in the context that it would be such the norm in our country. I want to live long enough to be alive for the day when most people don’t remember it any other way.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I’m always reading Edible Portland, of course. And, I’m lucky to read it a season ahead, in advance of it’s publish date. I look at COMFOOD, Eater PDX, and the FoodHub blog daily, and the Capital Press weekly. I’m addicted to checking FoodHub membership growth; I’ll log in every 10 minutes.

Who’s in your community?

Farmers, ranchers, and fisherman of all shapes and sizes. Right now my community is primarily the FoodHub community, all the sellers, buyers, and also the associates (freelance writers, NGOs, farmers market managers, etc.) plus the distributors from the Syscos to the small mom and pops that use the service. We’re trying to create a hub that’s neutral and for everyone from Republicans to Democrats, and from small farmers to big; it’s a dynamic community. With FoodHub we have an opportunity to daylight the fact that not all organic farmers are small and unsophisticated in their business practices and not all large corporate farmers are irresponsible in regards to their environmental practices; I’m constantly trying to bridge these perceptual differences.

What are your commitments?

Getting more sleep. Trying to practice what I preach both professionally and personally. On the professional side I work for Ecotrust, which is focused on the triple bottom line, so I’m constantly managing those parameters and looking at how to create a sense of balance and sustainability in my daily as well as professional life.

What are your goals?

To contribute to making the vision I described a reality. I want to create a world in which it is the norm that everyone has access to truly authentic, nutritious food. My goals are related to that vision on the food access side and also to making sure that the next generation, since they live in a world that knows no other way, will be food literate, that they understand that food is from a natural system. Food literacy is a big goal, especially with my own children.

What does change look like to you?

Change needs to be sweeping. I feel like we’re on the verge, but we’re nowhere close. Food has never been more in the national spotlight, but we need to increase our efforts tenfold for the vision to come to fruition.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

Having just returned from D.C., I think I’m more motivated than ever to work on policy change. We have this debate at Ecotrust all the time, should we focus on consumers and eaters or just on policy makers and decision makers? But I think we need to do both. I feel like we have a tremendous opportunity to influence change through policy at a federal level. But, we also have a lot to work on at the state level. The grassroots movement has to push toward something specific, policy-wise. It can’t just be a movement in service of the culinary delights of good food. It has to be a movement toward viable systems that make equitable access to better food front and center.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

The National Farm to School Network. Ecoturst serves as the Western Regional Lead Agency.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

I have my eye on some of the food festivals right now, like Eat Real and Slow Food Nation. We’re hosting a significant food festival in Portland in 2012, name TBD–it will have the word Portland in it, I can tell you that. I’ve been watching The Good Food Awards. I’m really into the festivals and awards, things that get us out of the advocacy world and into the world of tastemakers. SXSW, that sort of thing.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

I absolutely think real policy change is a possibility. I point to the school food legislation that just passed in Oregon. Even in the legislative year before, we passed legislation that allows state agencies to state a preference for Oregon grown, processed or manufactured foods. There are great examples of state policies across the nation, whether for preferential sourcing or for supporting food policy councils. I’ve seen lots of really creative policies and increasingly ones that are less of a one size fits all approach; more recently I’ve been encouraged by the sense that legislators recognize our agricultural landscape is diverse so we have to shift policy to meet that diversity. In our county we spent the last 18 months creating a really detailed vision for our food future. There’s no lack of energy around policy.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

I think it needs to get over itself a little bit. I think it needs to work across the aisle. A little less finger pointing. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of pretty darn good. I’m fascinated by the negative backlash against Whole Foods, for example, when we have so many bigger fights to fight.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

I would have a mixing bowl full of fava beans with lemon olive oil, a little bit of shallots, a little bit of goat cheese. A mixing bowl that someone else shelled and prepared. The meal would have to include pork of some kind, a beautiful, farm fresh cheese and a fresh green salad with fennel and asparagus. Lots of vegetables. Hopefully I can have it in the spring time.

Thomas F. “Fred” Stokes was born and raised on a small diversified family farm in Kemper County, Mississippi. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the Army and later completed Infantry Officers Candidate School and received a commission. His 20 years of military service included two tours in Vietnam. He retired in 1972 as a Major. He returned to Mississippi and has been involved in the cattle business and active in agricultural and rural life issues ever since. Fred is deeply concerned about the disappearance of the family farm and ranch and the decay in rural America and is widely known as an outspoken critic of U. S. farm and trade policy. He was instrumental in founding Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) and Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA). He currently serves as the Executive Director of OCM and on the board of CPA. He and his wife of 50 plus years live on their small cattle farm in East Central Mississippi.

What issues have you been focused on?

Our issue is making the marketplace a fair game as it affects farmers and ranchers in rural America. Over the years competition has disappeared and prices come from the corporate boardroom rather than a dynamic market in consideration of supply and demand. The game is rigged to the benefit of large corporations and the detriment of the family farmer and rancher.

What inspires you to do this work?

I was born and raised on a diversified family farm. By reasonable standards we were poor but everyone else was the same. It was a good life. There was a culture and fraternity that I think is worth saving. We’re losing our family farms and replacing it with a corporate model that’s detrimental to our national interests and the heritage of our country.

What’s your overall vision?

It may be more a dream than a vision. My hope is that we can restore competition by prompting government to exercise their authority under the law and break up some of these monopolies and cartels, so the little people have a chance. The big corporations set the price and it’s never enough for the small farmer or rancher. Please understand my vision is not in restoring the Little House on the Prairie, a ridiculous romantic notion, but in restoring a rural family life with swing sets, families and school buses and all the things that go with a rural culture. I think it’s a vital part of the fabric of our country.

Who’s in your community?

I live in rural Mississippi in a county that is large geographically and sparsely populated with about 10 thousand people. We are a majority black county and most of the people here live in small communities or on a farm but make their living someplace else or survive on government transfer payments. That’s what’s happened to agriculture over the years, farms don’t provide a living, people have to go elsewhere for that. I consider myself and my wife very fortunate. We have a half mile square block of land that has a house lot, a lake and wild game and garden and privacy. I’m retired from the military and she’s a retired civil servant so we have the benefit of living the lifestyle of a farm without having to make a living on the farm.

What are your commitments?

My commitment is to try to unscrew the world that my generation has really fouled up for my grandkids and failing getting that result; have them know we made a good faith effort.

What are your goals?

I want to see rising expectations return as the norm, rather than declining expectations. I want to see job opportunities and markets that are fair. I want trade that is fair and balanced rather than a negative situation where we have China holding massive debt and leverage over our country and impacting our sovereignty. I want an America much like the one I had the privilege of living in which is rapidly disappearing.

What does change look like to you?

There have been so many changes already. For one, while we still bill ourselves as the global superpower and preeminent military and economic power on the globe, it is very clear we’re on a slide downhill and sometime in the not too distant future we will be displaced from that dominance. It’s also clear our children and grandchildren had their hopes and aspirations diminished by the all-consuming greed and indifference that has gripped my generation.

I’m not absolutely confident we can pull it off. But I want to re-industrialize our country and re-establish many things that were the heart of our country in the past. I want to focus on people and quality of life rather than the greed and bottom line thinking I see out there that repulses me. We all want to be prosperous and successful but we’ve gone too far and we need to regain our footing. This relationship between employers and employees has gotten all out of whack. The gap between the wealthy and not so wealthy is out of proportion. The poor having an opportunity to become middle class is diminishing. All the trend lines I see take us over a cliff.

Reversing the trends, that’s exactly what I want to do.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

Obviously our government is going to have to play a big role in this. So we try to in any number of ways, not just lobbying, to influence public policy and the actions of our government so we can have these outcomes. We want the marketplace to be fair instead of systematically shortchanging those who grow and produce things. We want balanced and fair trade so we don’t continually run massive deficits in trade. We want a balanced budget instead of carrying on like a bunch of drunken sailors. What I see is that people don’t factor into the equation anymore. It’s about efficiency and there’s a prevailing view about economy and efficiency of scale. So we’re eliminating small businesses and the market is dominated by global and transnational corporations run by CEOs that are ruthless men obsessed with the bottom line. One of the ways to affect the bottom line is to short change and mistreat the employees. And, that’s different from the past.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

Reforming the Beef Checkoff Program [PDF] is one of our highest priorities. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is the prime contractor and has hijacked and perverted the program. The program generates some $80 billion a year. We want an accounting and reform of that program. They have used these funds, in my view, for an agenda diametrically opposed to the interests of the people funding the program. A performance review revealed blatant abuses and we were influential in prompting a U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Inspector General audit.

We’re also looking at global fertilizer cartels. They are in a position to exact what they want from people who have to have fertilizer to continue farming.

We’re working on a piece of legislation passed in 1921 which governs the markets and competition pertaining to livestock. The law has been perverted and abused. There are new rules being put forth by USDA that would restore it to its original intent if they are ultimately finalized.

The U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance is another burr under our saddle. The members are not farmers or ranchers, they are big business people who support the industrial agriculture model. They have appropriated the good name of farmers and ranchers as a stalking horse for their agenda. They are also tapping into our checkoff money from cattle, soybeans and other crops to sell industrial agriculture to the consuming public. If successful, this would be the demise of the family farm.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

I’m a registered Republican, but I am heartened somewhat by the present administration. I was very impressed with USDA Secretary Vilsack and his precise insights into the problems of family agriculture as he expressed them at several of five workshops I attended.

Christine Varney is the Chief of the antitrust division of the U. S. Department of Justice. I’ve previously referred to her as Teddy Roosevelt in a skirt. She made very strong pronouncements about addressing the antitrust abuses that have affected agriculture. It has been two years now and I haven’t seen any heads come down the aisle. So, I’m a little less enamored at the moment.

Of course these folks have political bosses and the mission of those bosses is to get re-elected.

The more I learn and the more I see the more cynical I become.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a possibility?

The chances of the trends being reversed is slim. Concentration and vertical integration are a deadly combination. The poultry industry is a great example. Some years back there was a scheme introduced by Tyson, Purdue and the other big poultry companies that induced farmers to build chicken houses for about $200,000 each. And farmers go into debt to do it. The poultry companies give them baby chickens and the feed and the farmer has a mortgage and does the bidding of the integrator. The integrator can sever the contract at will and the farmer has no way to service the mortgage; so it’s a powerful tool the integrator holds.

The chicken model was the first and the hog industry went the same way almost overnight. There’s two markets out there: a cash market and contract market. The contract market is inherently indenturing for the producer. It’s sold under the guise of being efficient, but maybe that’s just for the integrator, not the producer.

That trend to get very big and to vertically integrate is well along and I fear will carry the day in the future. Cattle aren’t so far down that line but it’s on the way. The market is getting thinner and smaller and easier to integrate. The cattle business is by far the largest sector of agriculture in America, I hope we can reform it so there are independent cattle ranchers in the future.

I served 20 years in the service and two tours in Vietnam and went to OCS and received a commission. I took an oath to protect the public from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I think the enemy to my kids and grandchildren is domestic… the Wall Street bandits and large corporations bent on nothing but bottom line profits to the detriment of the future and security of the country.

Globalization in my opinion is a very bad idea.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

We’re a nonprofit and we’re handicapped. We don’t have K Street attorneys and it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that the politicians on Capital Hill go with the money. These massive campaign contributions make them vote a certain way and take certain positions on the issues. Money carries the day. I’m sad to say that, but that’s my belief. We do the best we can, try to appeal to their sense of decency and fair play and many times they say nice words and such back; but their vote, most of the time, is contrary to that. Big business interests prevail and frankly I’m burning out. I’m getting frustrated and tired knowing that I’m right and yet seeing the people motivated by greed and indifferent about the future of the county and their kids and have that behavior prevail.

We need money. But it’s not everything. It’s not a good way to keep score in life.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

My two favorite dishes are steak and seafood. Maybe a nice, big, greasy, well-marbled medium-rare rib eye with an abalone cutlet.

Sue Ujcic is an innovative farmer and a champion of what’s possible when communities work together. She is as adept in connecting people to good food, good health, and good times as she is harvesting potatoes.

As co-owner of Helsing Junction Farm in Rochester, Washington, just outside of Olympia, Sue and her business partner, Anna Salafsky, have worked since 1992 with almost the same crew of 12 people to farm and grow 30 acres of organic vegetables, fruit, and flowers to serve their 800-member CSA program, one of the most established in the country. Much of their produce throughout the growing season is also donated to the local food bank where they deliver weekly CSA shares directly to recipients, a program funded by donations from their members, which they match.

What issues have you been focused on?

Linking low-income people with fresh organic produce. We’re a very established farm and that gives us a great opportunity to share our produce with food banks and soup kitchens. Volunteers come to the farm to glean and through our CSA we run a food bank farm. Our members donate funds and we match them, so that we can donate CSA shares to the food bank. That way people who rely on the food bank participate in the whole program. My other big focus is nutrition, linking low-income people to good food in particular.

What inspires you to do this work?

After more than 25 years of farming I’m still inspired by being with nature. The mystery of a seed germinating is still something that puts me in awe every year. I never take anything for granted and the fact that seeds carry so much information and have all this nutrition for you and can feed your soul and your physical body… that alone motivates me to start out every spring. And then with running a CSA program, my relationship to the farm and the community of eaters that we created also excites me.

What’s your overall vision?

To come from a place of gratitude and generosity. I truly believe that if you’re a really generous person and you have the resources to be generous, you’ll just have more to be generous with. I feel that the process of abundance is very real to me as a farmer. It just feels like the more we are able to give food away to people who are in need, the more we are given to give away. That’s been my consistent experience.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I was reading a book called Northwest Weather, a really great book about weather. I’m reading a book by Irène Némirovsky, a collection of short stories, she was the author of Suite Française. I’ve been reading about organic farming methods and different tillage methods, since we’re making some changes on the farm. Civil Eats is the one blog I read regularly. I read the New Yorker regularly, the Sunday New York Times (we take turns going out to the town to get them for each other, it’s been a ritual for years).

Who’s in your community?

Certainly my family. My immediate community is a really great group of farmers. Our whole valley is almost all certified organic now, so I live amongst dairy farmers and produce farmers. My diet is essentially a five-mile diet. Then there’s the community of eaters with the CSA—half of our members have been with us 10 or more years. So I feel connected to them as community.

What are your commitments?

My commitments are to my family, to my immediate community and I’m really committed to always making decisions from a place of love and faith instead of from fear. I think decisions made from that place are most successful.

What are your goals?

Ultimately to put really good, positive energy out in to the world and appreciate all the beauty around me.

What does change look like to you?

A place where people are in closer relationship to one another and are more integrated in their community.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

The most important outreach is to engage children first and foremost and in regard to changing our food system and our relationship to farming and food in particular, we have to engage children. That’s why we have all these places and programs on the farm where we work with children to teach them about agriculture, nutrition, healthy eating, and whole foods.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

Food banks and Boys and Girls Club of America, K-Records which is a local music label with which we co-host a musical festival on our farm, which is also a fundraiser for a food related cause. Local schools. And, we have several farms that partner with our CSA.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

I am really impressed by anyone who is saving seed and developing new varieties suited for wherever they are. I think the magic in creating life through seeds is fascinating and I’m totally inspired by that work. Vandana Shiva and her ability to synthesize and impart so much information in such an integrated way. It’s beautiful.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

I don’t see a lot of real change in food policy. I think fundamentally corporate ag will try to hold on as long as they can. But that said, I think in 20 years, farms are going to become more important and there will be far more mid-sized farms. They will also be more widespread despite any blocks in policy simply out of sustainable need. That said, marketing and distribution models like CSAs aren’t involved in any kind of policy, we’re just farming. People are paying you to grow their food and it takes out the need for any subsidies or loans. Just creating an alternative model and showing it can be successful. That’s new agriculture.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

We need to have some way to help people become aware of who farmers are. Rather than subsidize crops, the government should subsidize farmers. I’d love to see farmers drive their tractors to every state capital, not even farm anymore, and create the awareness that people need to understand who is exactly growing their food. We need to change food in schools, we need to feed children healthy nutritious food while they are developing so they will develop curiosity and be able to question things.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

Some amazingly made eggplant Parmesan and my Mom’s blueberry pie.

Learn more about Sue and Helsing Junction by checking out Leslie Hatfield’s podcast interview with her today on the Ecocentric Blog. Yay Sue! We love you.

Helene York is both an educator and coach for Bon Appétit Management Company, the socially responsible food service company that operates more than 400 on-site cafés for universities, corporate employers, and museums in 31 states. She is also the director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, whose mission is to educate chefs and consumers about how their food choices affect the global environment and to catalyze changes in the supply chain.

Helene conceived and helped launch Bon Appétit’s Low Carbon Diet program in 2007. The goal of the program is twofold: To raise awareness of the connection between the food system and climate change and to reduce emissions associated with Bon Appétit’s food service operations by 25 percent over five years. To date, the program has achieved reductions by approximately five million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions each month.

In 2010 she was named a Seafood Champion by Seafood Choices Alliance for her steadfast commitment to sustainable seafood on a global level. Since 2009 Helene has been a regular contributor to the Life channel of the Atlantic Monthly online and a frequent guest lecturer at universities across the country on the subject of the food system’s relationship to climate change.

What issues have you been focused on?

Last summer we successfully challenged our chefs to sign up our 1,000th Farm to Fork vendor, representing tremendous growth since we launched this program way back in 1999—long before the word “locavore” had been coined, let alone become a buzzword. I’m really proud that we work with so many small, local, independently operated farms and artisans.

But we’re finding that the criteria we currently use to define “small” (under $5 million in sales) and “local” (within 150 miles of our cafés) can be limiting, especially when it comes to protein. I’ve found owner-operated, humane-certified chicken farms, for example, that have more than $5 million in sales per year but are featherweights compared to the Big Birds of poultry. Should they be excluded from our Farm to Fork program? Currently they are. So we’re looking at how we keep the integrity of the program if we were to widen the definition. I’m also examining what “local” means for fish. “Good Choice” albacore tuna might be landed in Portland, but if it was caught 1,000 miles out to sea, can Oregonians really call it a “locally caught” fish?

What inspires you to do this work?

I see myself as supporting 500 chefs who are committed to making so-called “institutional food” taste great and be healthy. Some of them are responsible for feeding thousands of people every day. My job is to help them source foods as responsibly as possible and give them tools to push wherever they can. Lots of them have helped medium-size farmers and ranchers change their practices by nudging them toward a third-party certification of humane practices or reduced pesticide usage. It so makes my day to hear those stories of making change.

What’s your overall vision?

Food that is prized more and wasted less. Foodsheds that are regional in nature and not dependent on a few enormous global actors. Persuading some of the bigger players to make meaningful changes in their food production and distribution practices—to use radically fewer chemicals, treat their workers and animals well, keep nutrients in basic foods instead of injecting additives later, and use “natural” food waste to replenish the land rather than add to the landfill.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I’m reading an advance copy of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland about the absolutely insane Florida tomato industry. Insane from an environmental standpoint because the natural sandy soil can’t support growing commodity tomatoes in Florida and there’s so far to go to make the labor conditions there truly humane.

I’m also nearly done with Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), a fascinating romp through millennia of beer, wine, tea, and cola drinking that shows humanity’s tendency to commodify foodstuffs and trade it globally. These aren’t new phenomena.

Who’s in your community?

Everyone from prep cooks learning to use vegetable trimmings for stock and weigh their kitchen waste, to NGOs looking for business leadership to buy certain products or speak out in favor of a public policy, to suppliers of every stripe who claim environmental benefits of their “eco-friendly” products. I support the first two; I bust the third.

What are your commitments?

Personally, I don’t eat meat, even though I’m on the board of Humane Farm Animal Care and visit ranchers often who do a tremendous job. I respect what they do, but I feel very strongly about meat’s impact on climate change and its overuse of natural resources per calories delivered compared to other foods. Plus piglets are awfully darn adorable! It’s hard not to think about that when I think about food for a living.

Professionally—well, Bon Appétit has a very long list of commitments. In addition to the Farm to Fork Program we launched in 1999, we’ve addressed the overuse of antibiotics, sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, the connection between food and climate change, and most recently, farmworkers’ rights. And we now source Fair Trade-certified baking chocolate for our kitchens. We’re the first food service company to do so.

What are your goals?

It’s natural for me to think about chef goals and I’m so delighted when I hear them talk about how they changed their menus to reflect our Low Carbon Diet principles. This isn’t “my” project anymore. It’s theirs! They’re the ones making it happen on the ground every day. But my goal is to reach all the line cooks in the kitchens, like the ladies I met in Washington, DC, who are proud to be feeding healthy food to students, and taking those lessons home to their own kids and grandkids. I spent much of a week last year alongside cooks in one of our kitchens to know what it’s all about. When I think about initiatives, I think about reaching them.

What does change look like to you?

Change means redefining lunch on a national scale. Sandwich options at most places are so limited: Turkey, grilled chicken, roast beef, or an under-cooked eggplant slice with red pepper, all of which hide under a block of factory-processed cheese, a tasteless pink tomato slice, and piece of wilted lettuce. Many ethnic options are similarly homogenous: How often do you see actual vegetables in a “veggie burrito” and why do burritos have to weigh a pound and a half, anyway? Change means caring enough to put these scenarios out of business, having responsible meat as optional toppings, a wide variety of fresh seasonal produce options, and reasonable quantities.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

The supply chain for a big company does not change quickly. We spent two years creating the Low Carbon Diet and then established a five-year timeline starting from launch in 2007. Some goals were met early (we committed to reducing beef purchases by 25 percent in two years but hit a 33 percent reduction during that time) and others, like completely eliminating air-freighted seafood, have been hampered by a lack of transparency in our suppliers’ reporting systems. Every change effort requires buy-in from many people—chefs, managers, suppliers—and everyone’s busy. Our initiative isn’t their top priority that day; making lunch for 3,000 is. I’ve got to make sure that I express our goals in a way that anticipates their questions and needs and is reasonable. It’s also important to give everyone a sense that the project is part of a larger vision, connected to an idea bigger than all of us, and that we can help bring about through our individual actions.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

We have worked closely with a number of independent organizations to guide our purchasing policies and renew our intellectual underpinnings for them over the years, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) for the antibiotics-reduction policies that guide our meat purchasing; Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC) for our egg purchasing policy; The Monterey Bay Aquarium and Ocean Conservancy for seafood; Fair Trade USA for coffee, tea, bananas and a program under development; and Ecotrust on the Low Carbon Diet, among others.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

The grass-roots movement around urban agriculture springing up in so many corners of the country. Preliminary academic research is showing that many small, diversified programs in inner cities are more environmentally efficient than many rural operations in terms of energy, water, and transportation use. They offer the added benefit of teaching a new generation of young consumers about seasonality, respect for farming, and that fresh-picked, unprocessed peas tastes a lot better than frozen peas.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

I think we have to be vigilant and patient at the same time and despite how oxymoronic that sounds: Vigilant about pushing for progress, but patient because this is going to take a long time. The current food system took 150 years to develop, much of it with federal support: Railroad infrastructure and refrigerated box cars brought us uniform beef; aquaducts and canal systems brought us industrial agriculture; state-by-state approaches to regulating agriculture have given us a patchwork of environmental and labor laws that fail to protect workers, waterways, and soil in much of the country. We’ll achieve change if we focus on the big things and recognize that full-scale change can only happen in a generation at the earliest.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

Every successful movement for change—the Civil Rights Movement is a great example—included many personalities and a variety of agendas, but the ultimate goals were few and clear—and took decades to realize success. Food activists ultimately need to rally around a few well-articulated priorities and reduce the fussing that will dissipate our collective strength. I liked Tom Philpott’s only half-joking proposal to form a Vegan/Omnivore Alliance Against Animal Factories. Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat childhood obesity is bringing together strange bedfellows behind an important cause, but many committed activists prefer to scorn the efforts because big business has signed on or it doesn’t go far enough. In my view, this a huge step right now in the right direction. We need to examine what our primary goals and our long-term “non-negotiables” should be so we can measure progress toward achieving them.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

A traditional kaiseki ryori, multi-course Japanese meal using seasonable vegetables and fresh, sustainable seafood, including really fishy fish such as oysters, mackerel, uni and sardines.

Highland Hills is one of those down-and-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large across the hazy north Texas horizon and is linked to this poverty-plagued neighborhood by a seven-mile ribbon of light-rail steel. Ledbetter Avenue crosses the train line passing vacant buildings, empty parking lots, and a dizzying array of “For Sale” and “For Jesus” signs. Named for the renowned guitar picker Lead Belly who did time in these parts–both in and out of prison–the Avenue speaks little in the way of promise, but wails the blues of poverty loud and clear.

Like cockroaches in a post-nuclear winter, the only commercial survivors appear to be pawn shops, Dollar stores, and fast-food joints. One supermarket, a Minyard whose cinder-blocked and windowless façade is about as inviting as the entrance to Stalag 13, is the only retail food source in the surrounding miles of food desert. But a lifeline from an unlikely source has arrived via a group of innovative academics. Paul Quinn College, a historically black college that sits at the neighborhood’s eastern edge is committed to lifting the Highland Hills’ physical and economic health with a combination of food, farming, and servant leadership.

To drive by the campus is to, well, keep on driving. There are no signature ivy-clad buildings or tree-shaded quads, in fact the first roadside buildings you see are in various states of demolition. Student enrollment plunged from 600 to 200 and the school has experienced on-going accreditation problems. At first glance anyway, and like the adjoining neighborhood it wants to help, Paul Quinn appears to be hanging on by no more than a pea tendril.

But first glances are deceiving, and pea tendrils are stronger than they look. And when your back’s to the wall and nobody, even your own government, will help you, you fight like hell, you do the unexpected. You take risks.

In this case not only did the college take risks, it committed a grievous sin, at least by Texas standards–they terminated their football program and turned their field into an organic farm. Yes, in the shadow of the Super Bowl, with the specter of Tom Landry looking down, and the holy glare of Friday night lights forever dimmed, they ripped up sacred turf and planted–goalpost to goalpost–peas, lettuce, carrots, strawberries, and more, lots more.

While the roar from the stands may have subsided, the field has not fallen silent. When farm manager Andrea Bithell announced to student and staff volunteers that the kohlrabi had gone in last week, everyone cheered. Showing a group of farm visitors where the corn would be planted later this spring evoked a round of applause from students who proclaimed their love of its sweet kernels. The competitive spirit and enthusiasm so much a part of college athletics is hardly lacking at “Food for Good Farm,” the name chosen to denote it’s larger mission of education, community service, and healthy food for all. Sounding more like a coach than a farmer, Bithell uses words like hustle to describe her student crew’s effort to plant and seed the two-acre field. When the volunteers complained about working in the cold and the rain, she reminded them that football games are played in all kinds of weather. Even the plants are forced to compete in a set of 12 trial beds located in the south end zone. Here students test different growing methods and evaluate their potential financial rate of return.

Elizabeth Wattley, Director of Service Learning, said with pride that the farm’s tomatoes were better than anything she’d ever bought in a grocery store. Biology major Symphonie Dawson giggled when she described the farm’s mascot that they temporarily borrowed from Delta State University. “It’s the ‘Fighting Okra,’ an image of the vegetable wearing boxing gloves. We borrowed it because last year’s okra crop seemed to go on forever.” The “Rah-rah, Go Team, Go!” energy previously reserved for football games is now channeled into the planting of 1500 strawberry plants, 6600 onions, a new asparagus bed, and dozens of vegetable varieties. “The farm is the light of the college,” said Wattley.

Once on the ropes, Paul Quinn has gained a reprieve by discovering the multiple benefits of farming while also turning attention outward to the community. One major need the farm addresses is healthy living and eating, no small concern on today’s college campuses, especially one surrounded by a food desert. “Before their work on the farm, students wouldn’t eat carrots unless they were smothered in ranch dressing,” said Bithell. But by getting their hands in the dirt–a task that usually took two or three visits to get past the “yuck” declaration–students started eating carrots right out of the ground, dirt and all. “They actually taste,” said Wattley, pausing for a moment to find the right adjective, “carrot-tee.”

By engaging students in the school’s biology and social entrepreneurship courses, the farm gives young people a chance to get hands-on laboratory experience while getting their hands in the dirt. Even the students who don’t care to venture into the world of bugs and compost get a taste of the farm’s output. The cafeteria now offers a monthly dish to showcase the farm’s harvest and introduce students to food that is healthy, tasty, and very local. Jasmine Wynn, a freshman legal studies major, summed up the farm’s health benefits best. “I’m a city girl from Dallas, and for me the farm was something new. I liked being out there. I also started getting serious about my diet and decided that organic food is better for you. It’s just part of a healthier lifestyle, and I want to stick around for a long time.”

The lack of farming experience or a farm background has not been a deterrent to anyone’s participation, including school President Michael J. Sorrell. With public policy and law degrees from Duke University, his stellar resume shows he has represented American Airlines and Morgan Stanley, served on numerous commissions including an assignment at the White House, and was selected in 2009 as one of the 10 Best Historically Black College and University presidents. However, lacking from Dr. Sorrell’s career synopsis, which also includes representing top-flight athletes like Utah Jazz’s Deron Williams, are any agricultural credentials. So why did he eliminate the football program and have the audacity to make the field into a farm?

A big part of the answer lies in his commitment to servant leadership, which, like the farm, is a concept he brought to Paul Quinn. With such simple but difficult to live by ideas like putting others before self, leaving the world a better place than you found it, and maintaining spiritual faithfulness, Dr. Sorrell not only preaches what he practices (he teaches a freshman course in servant leadership), he practices what he preaches. The farm is the center of that practice.

Isaiah 58: 9-12 gets prominent mention on the College’s website which also touts the school’s Christian underpinnings. The scripture admonishes us “to pour yourself out for the hungry…then shall your light rise in the darkness…and you shall be like a watered garden.” The Food for Good Farm is set on serving the hardscrabble community that surrounds it and though a share of the harvest goes to the cafeteria, 10 percent is donated to a local food pantry, a sizeable share is sold on a weekly basis to the community from the field’s former hot dog stand, and just to preserve some historical symmetry, the Dallas Cowboys buy a small share of the farm’s organic veggies.

The “adaptive re-use” of the field has been impressive under Bithell and Wattley’s leadership. The hash stripes are gone as well as the top four inches of sod and dirt that they replaced by dump truck loads of pure organic matter. Reflecting the program’s absolute commitment to organic farming, there was simply too much distrust of the chemical residues from years of a perfectly green gridiron. The goalposts remain as do the blocking sled, scoreboard and the bleachers running the length of both sides of the field. The former press box will be turned into a chicken coop and Wattley retains some hope that the bleachers can be repurposed as a greenhouse. Acres of adjoining land are being eyed for farm expansion, especially if a federal grant comes through.

None of this extraordinary progress has come cheaply. The school has made significant capital expenditures to accomplish this conversion and the on-going operating costs, which are only marginally offset by farm sales. An April fundraiser featuring Will Allen hopes to swell the coffers to enable the farm to buy its own tractor.

The rapid development of the farm, and the rising fortunes of Paul Quinn College have come with a price, however. The Food for Good Farm is the result of a 50/50 partnership with PepsiCo’s Food for Good Initiative. The college makes it clear that this is an equal partnership and that PepsiCo has not placed any strings on their giving. Other than cleaning up its tarnished image, one cannot detect any sinister covert or overt motives in the cola giant’s support. Yet the contradictions can’t be ignored. After all, Pepsi and other soda makers have contributed more than their fair share of calories to America’s obesity crisis.

In the meantime, it’s hard to argue with the outcome of the partnership. Texas has one less football field and one more organic farm, clearly a net gain for humanity.